When manufacturing bevel gears a burr emerges at the outer tooth end due to the cutting processing, and in particular mainly at the concave flanks, because this flank forms a relatively pointed angle with the back surface of the bevel gear tooth. If one would remove the burr at this location only, a very sharp profile edge would remain. Because of the large danger of injury, but also because of the danger of the full hardening when annealing the bevel gears these edges frequently are broken by a chamfer. If this angle is not so pointed, because the bevel gear has e.g. a small spiral angle, it is enough to deburr the edge.
For this chamfering and/or deburring of bevel gears and particularly of ring gears devices are known, which were developed for conventional mechanical bevel gear cutting machines. Already during milling the bevel gears in the intermittent discontinuous processing after each tooth gap the tooth ends are deburred. Or with the continuous milling procedure after gear cutting in a separate processing step chamfering and/or deburring is carried out.
Often also separately standing deburring devices are being employed. With these devices the disadvantage of additional work piece clamping is accepted, in order to obtain more space in the proximity of the workpiece than in a gear-cutting machine, because then the deburring tools can be adjusted more versatile and more simply to the respective workpiece dimensions. In addition more bevel gears can be cut on a gear-cutting machine in same time if they do not also have to be deburred there.
In a well-known deburring device, which is employed directly on a gear-cutting machine, a multi-threaded flying cutter is used, whose axis of rotation is adjusted in such a way that the edge of the impact tooth moves along the profile edge of a bevel gear tooth which is to be chamfered. In this case one does not work using the discontinuous method but at constant workpiece rotation, so that successively each following impact tooth meshes with the next bevel gear gap. The crucial disadvantage is however that not all bevel gears can be deburred on their gear-cutting machine with an impact tooth drill. As a further disadvantage is regarded that special impact tooth drills must be used.
When manufacturing ring gears the ring gear is transferred typically after gear cutting into a change position. During transferring into the change position a deburring cutter is used, which deburrs one tooth profile of the ring gear in the continuous procedure after the other. The deburring cutter is implemented as cut-back solid steel cutter from HSS. It is a disadvantage of this principle that the cutting speed of the HSS steels is limited. Thus the time that expires during the transferring into the change position is normally not sufficient, in order to finish up the deburring of the entire ring gear. It is a further disadvantage that due to the relief the cutter is subject to certain restrictions in the layout of the cutting edge geometry and is thus applicable only for deburring one kind of ring gear. If one wants to deburr another kind of ring gear, either another drill with another geometry must be used, or one uses a drill which is not optimally laid out by geometry of the edges, but is suited for deburring several kinds of ring gears. Due to such a non-optimal layout of the edge geometry the cutters are employable for different kinds of ring gears, but they can be operated only with lower speed, in order to prevent a damage of the edges.
It is also possible to grind the cutters differently, for which purpose these must be sent in usually, which is time-consuming and expensive.
It is hence an object of the invention to develop a bevel gear cutting machine in such a way that very different bevel gears can be chamfered and/or deburred with small technical effort.
A further object of the invention lies in the development of a bevel gear cutting machine in such a way that the longer period spent by the workpiece in the gear-cutting machine for deburring is relatively short.
A further object of the invention lies in the developing of a device for use in a bevel gear cutting machine in order to be able to chamfer and/or to deburr very different bevel gears with small technical effort.